A Morning in March, c.1920 by Nikolai Astrup. He often depicted snow as the enemy, appearing only in the distance, on bleak mountain tops.
Photograph: Dag Fosse/KODE

There are two kinds of landscape artists. Let’s call them rangers and diggers. The first type travel far and wide, finding inspiration in exotic places and grand scenery. The second stay at home and dig down deep into their own world. If JMW Turner was the ultimate ranger, always off somewhere new, his contemporary John Constable was a digger who painted his “boyhood scenes” (as he called them) over and over again.

Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup emerges from obscurity

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Nikolai Astrup was another digger who painted his childhood surroundings again and again all his life. But he came from a far more startling place than Constable’s East Anglia. Astrup was the son of a pastor in Jølster, a Norwegian village poised between terrifying mountains and glassy water on a lake at the end of a fjord. He stayed in this locale all his life and painted it with an insider’s intimacy. In one picture, an old woman carries a bucket of glowing coals to a rocky river. This strange image comes from local folklore – a Jølster tale had it that a woman warms the soil in this way every spring.

Astrup’s eye is most profoundly local in what he chooses not to dwell on. An outsider visiting Scandinavia might think of snow as an obvious subject. Astrup rarely paints it. Snow appears only in the distance, on bleak mountain tops. It is the enemy. For Astrup, life is green – he paints the fresh vegetation of spring and summer; yellow marigolds in the meadow; trees in the rain; the mad light of bonfires on Midsummer’s Eve.

Foxgloves, 1927, by Nikolai Astrup. Photograph: Anders Bergersen

He loves green. Vibrant shades of it give this exhibition an emerald glow. Astrup’s world is a fragile human community surrounded by sublime nature. Wooden farm buildings rise from the ground on low stilts, with roofs covered in grass and moss. The white walls and dark windows of his childhood home face mighty mountains looming above. Women and children picnic in crisp spring air. This little community seems threatened by terrible forces above and below: trolls in the mountains, monsters from the fjord.

There is a primitive and ancient quality to Astrup’s rural Norway. Much of everyday Norwegian life a century ago remains unchanged from earlier times. His father would not let him visit the exciting Midsummer’s Eve bonfire as a child because it was a transparent survival of pagan beliefs. As an adult artist, he glories in its spectacle. One of his ritualistic paintings of the yellow flames, the night air smokey and the enraptured crowds amorous with drink and dancing, shows a boy silhoutted against the fire. Is it the young Nikolai, entranced by the ancient magic?

His world view has a Viking quality. Norse mythology pictures the cosmos as a multitude of worlds linked by the great tree Yggdrasil and suspended over the nothingness of Ginnungagap. Astrup’s homely but precarious-looking rural community is like the Norse Midgard, the human realm or “middle earth”. Above it are the terrifying mountain ice giants. Below, a void of bottomless water. In some of his paintings the creatures of these alien realms invade the tranquility of June nights. Wheat gathered on poles in the fields appears to shape itself into an army of trolls. A tree by the lake takes on a hideous demonic form.

March Atmosphere at Jølstravatnet, Before 1908, by Nikolai Astrup. Photograph: Anders Bergersen

Astrup even looks like a hobbit in his self-portraits. One drawn in 1927 has fairytale handwriting spiralling from his pipe like a Tolkien manuscript. It’s a shame Astrup never met the English reinventor of Norse myth – he might have made a fine illustrator for The Lord of the Rings. He was fascinated by graphic art. Like his contemporary Edvard Munch – who owned some of his prints – he also experimented with woodcut, attempting to recreate the stylised forms and glowing colours of Japanese woodblock prints with his own laborious layering of colours, again and again, over the same image.

Nikolai Astrup: the lost artist of Norway

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Poised between the civilised and the barbaric, Astrup’s paintings have a consciously barbarian, gleefully crude energy that has something in common with the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich, who painted scenes from Viking history and designed the primitivist costumes and sets for the original 1913 production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

For Astrup, too, it is the rites of spring and their culmination in the magic of Midsummer’s Eve that brings the earth to life and cause the human sap to rise. His art is primally connected to the cycle of nature and the hollows and shadows of a life lived close to the Arctic Circle. I want to go to this eerily beautiful Midgard where the trolls can still be glimpsed on a moonlit night.